IDC also differed from Gartner on server shipments, reporting that 2.2 million units were shipped in 1Q16, a decline of 3.0 percent from the first quarter of 2015.

"The real driver of global growth continues to be the hyperscale data center segment," Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement. "The enterprise and small or midsize business (SMB) segments remain relatively flat as end users in these segments accommodated their increased application requirements through virtualization and considered cloud alternatives."

IDC reported that it saw improved demand for x86 servers in the first quarter, with global revenue of $10.6 billion, or a 2.6 percent year-over-year gain. Non-x86 servers, however, declined by 28.7 percent.

"As expected, server growth slowed in the first quarter, with a clear end to the Intel-led enterprise refresh, a pause in hyperscale cloud expansion, and a very difficult year-on-year comparison in the high end of the market, coming off of a major mainframe refresh from IBM one year ago," said Kuba Stolarski, Research Director, Computing Platforms at IDC.

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